There’s no question that this is a challenging time to be a federal Liberal. Yes, we’re currently in the uncomfortable position of being the third party in Parliament and yes, some typically short-sighted commentators have written us off for dead. Despite all that, I passionately believe Canada now needs a revived Liberal Party more than ever before.

The future is not immutable – it’s what we collectively choose to make it. The forces currently at play in Canada and the world are driving us towards a darker future, one in which the lives of most of our children and grandchildren are likely to be harsher than ours. Those forces include increasing income inequality, a rapidly warming planet, other environmental degradation, a weakening social safety net, citizen disempowerment, and a precipitous decline in the influence and high regard Canada and Canadians once enjoyed in the world. One of the most pernicious consequences has been a loss of hope for a better future on the part of our youth (as evidenced by the May 2012 Frank Graves poll).

We humans who share this planet have the knowledge and the capability to forge a different and better future if we could only muster the collective will to make it happen. In the past, Canada would have played a positive leadership role in that respect. Tragically, almost every Harper government policy and action seeks to exacerbate rather than counter those negative forces, to the short-term benefit of a few at the long-term expense of practically everyone. Absent the Liberal Party, voters will have a stark choice between two opposing ideologies: neo-conservatism and socialism. They are two sides of the same coin, one promoting “econo-man” (an idealized purely rational and utterly selfish economic actor) and the other “socialist man” (an equally uni-dimensional caricature). Real people are far more complex and diverse, just like Canadians. True Liberals revel in that diversity, accept Canadians as they are and base public policy on the evidence – what works – rather than simplistic ideology. That’s why it will take a Liberal-led government to deliver the kind of future in which all Canadians can again thrive.

I sense a growing unease amongst our fellow citizen, the kind that resulted in almost 300 Kingstonians packing our April town hall meeting on climate change action rather than the 25 that Stéphane Dion was expecting. The Harper neo-conservatives have held onto power by discouraging civic engagement and voting, actively disempowering Canadians. Only 26% of the eligible electorate actually voted for Conservative candidates in the last election, compared to almost 40% who stayed home. The future that Mr. Harper is building doesn’t serve the interests of that 40%, who have the power to relegate the Conservatives to the dustbin of history if ever they choose to exercise it.

Regardless of how badly Canada needs a renewed Liberal Party, there’s no guarantee that we Liberals will rise to the occasion. I remain hopeful, which is why I continue to devote myself to party renewal and rebuilding, but realism requires that I recognize that unless we collectively reject expediency and return to principled policy leadership, we will continue to fade into irrelevancy. Quite frankly, I attribute our decade-long decline to the rise of the “apparatchik“, an apt Russian term which a former diplomatic colleague who has given up on our party astutely applies to the anonymous, unelected political operatives who have been calling the shots from our leaders’ offices and elsewhere in our organization throughout that period. Short-term tacticians all, they have wielded far more influence than either our members or our elected MPs. The results (where we are today versus where we should and used to be) speak for themselves.

While I’ve long been a critic of a Leader-driven party (precisely because that leads to apparatchik-driven policies and positioning), I have come to accept that the upcoming leadership race represents our last hope for the kind of deep changes that I see as essential to our survival and hence will be very significant for Canada’s future. My preference is to remain neutral in the race out of respect for the Party offices which I hold, but I will use these pages to articulate and explain the key challenges facing Canada and will analyze and score the platforms of the leadership candidates on the basis of the degree to which they do or don’t truly address those challenges.

To my fellow federal Liberals, especially those of you who served as delegates to our recently-completed Biennial Convention, thank you for your overwhelming expression of support. When I chose more than a year ago to stand for National President, I was under no illusions as to the chances of a non-establishment candidate like myself operating on a shoestring budget supplemented by modest donations from individual, like-minded members. One of our many governance deficiencies which I was determined to address is the lack of any spending limits or transparency on campaigns for national officer positions. That leaves us wide open to large corporate and similar donors having an inappropriate influence in our affairs. Given that and facing an archaic first-past-the-post voting system despite our having moved to preferential ballots in all of our other internal elections, it may appear quixotic to have even tried to mount a national campaign. I did so because the Party had become relatively closed to ideas and concerns coming up from the grassroots, an unfortunate habit that had a lot to do with our decade-long decline. I saw the presidency as the one elected position with the scope to make a difference, and a campaign for that position as the best available vehicle for getting new ideas in play.

In that objective at least, the campaign succeeded far beyond my expectations. Thanks to the efforts of a small team of extremely dedicated volunteers, we got our ideas out and those we picked up from Liberals across the country to the extent that, by the time of the Convention, they had been very broadly accepted, even to the extent of being incorporated into the platforms of my opponents. While necessary, ideas are only the first step in innovation, which I define as the adoption by a community of new and more effective practices. We as a Party are still a long way from that, and I worry that we may be too slow.

I will be out of touch for the remainder of this month on a much-needed, technology-free vacation but will start using this website once stripped of the campaign-related content as a blog for regular posts on how we turn ideas into action. If you sign up for email updates (“Keep me updated” on the home page) then you’ll automatically be notified whenever there’s something new. I would value you contributing not just your reactions to my thoughts but also your own.

I’m now in Ottawa for both the Thursday Council of Presidents meeting and for the Convention itself, the culmination of a year devoted to campaigning. Win or lose on Sunday, it has been an exhilarating year in which I met so many great Liberals from all over Canada and learned so much from you about your ideals, your ideas, your concerns, and how you’ve been treated by your Party. Thank you for that! It has been an honour.

The demands of the Convention won’t leave any more time for updating this site. If you are a delegate, please come to my meet-greet-and-speak event in the British Columbia Room on the 2nd floor of the Westin Hotel, Friday evening between 9 pm and midnight. I’ll do my best to answer any or all of your questions at that time. Unfortunately, the Convention organizers in their wisdom have dispensed with the traditionally substantive candidate speeches in favour of a sound-bite “debate” in which we’ll have only two minutes to speak to our candidacy and a minute each to answer five questions. That’s totally inadequate for providing delegates with what they need to make an informed decision on which presidential candidate is best equipped to turn this Party around. Quite frankly, that’s the only question which matters. My event will be about giving you that substance.

While I won’t have time to write any blog posts during the Convention, I thought that I would share with you this following answer that I just posted to an important question that was posed to all presidential candidates in the Liberals Rebuilding Facebook group:

Campaign spending is an important question for delegates because spending is arguably the best way to distinguish establishment from non-establishment candidates. It’s a truism in politics that establishment money lurks in the background, never going to the candidates of real change. In this race, unfortunately, there are no spending limits and no transparency. That’s one of the many things I’m standing for President to change!

I can only give a ballpark estimate at this point, having been to busy over the past two months to keep close track, but probably spent on the order of $14,000 on the whole campaign, which in my case has stretched over 12 months (I declared last January, when the Convention was scheduled for June).

To put that into perspective, it’s less than the cost of a single, well-appointed hospitality suite for at the Westin Hotel, where the Convention is being held. A couple of the campaigns are hosting two big hospitality suites on two consecutive nights.

Fourteen thousand may seem a lot, but I’ve learned that it’s a shoestring budget for mounting a national campaign. I did the vast majority of my travel by car. Just over $7,000 came from modest donations by individual Liberals. The balance, necessarily, comes out of my own pocket. I neither solicited nor accepted corporate or quasi-corporate donations. By quasi-corporate, I’m referring to the deep-pocketed law firms which have had so much influence in our Party over the past decade.

On Wednesday night, I was grateful to participate with my fellow presidential candidates in a fundraiser and debate organized by the University of Toronto Young Liberals. We had a great discussion about the role of youth in our party, and I thought that I would expand on that topic in this blog post.

I am proud that my riding of Kingston and the Islands has well over 300 Young Liberals, more than the total membership of many ridings! How have we done this? And what support do we need to provide to the Young Liberals in order to help them be successful?

I believe that the key to engaging youth, like other demographics such as aboriginals, women, seniors and ethnic communities is to empower them to contribute meaningfully to creating the kind of party they can best identify with. That means really listening to what they say, acting on what we hear and giving them scope to try out their ideas. The Young Liberals with whom I have worked are as politically and socially savvy as any other segment of the Party. They, like all our members, rapidly become disengaged when they recognize lip service and patronizing attitudes.

In my experience, youth are the fastest to jump at the chance to make a real difference – not just within the YLC, but within their riding associations and the larger Party. As National President, I would partner with them just like my riding did with the Queen’s University Liberal Association (QULA). That partnership and their resulting drive and determination produced fantastic results. The May 2nd election came at the worst possible time for university students – not only was the campaign during final exams, but the day of the vote itself was held the day after most Queen’s students leave town. Therefore, the odds were that most students would have been disenfranchised.

Together, we foresaw this problem and came up with a plan to beat it. QULA booked and we jointly staffed tables at Queens to encourage all students to vote at the advance polls. Seniors pitched in when the QULA students were in exams or studying and were available to drive those students who couldn’t make the advance polls to vote at the Elections Canada office. Seniors and students worked together to encourage students in cafeteria line-ups to go to the nearby advance polling station. As a result, the on-campus advance polls went overwhelming Liberal and provided a large chunk of our margin of victory over the Conservatives.

The voter turnout at the advance poll was much higher than usual, in part because in the previous election I had seen too many would-be Queen’s student voters having been discouraged by being unable to provide the proof-of-residence documentation required by Elections Canada, and decided to do something about it. Many months before the May election, I had arranged a meeting with the Chief Electoral Officer to which I invited a couple of QULA members who brought their available ID. As a direct result of that meeting, Elections Canada agreed to accept a Queen’s document which students could readily print off as proof of residence. This was just another example of how partnership, foresight, planning and attention to detail are part and parcel of creating winning conditions.

My platform is all about empowering members to get involved, bring their ideas forward and try them out. Far too often, we lose the potential volunteers who contact riding associations between elections because we don’t have anything for them to do at the time, and they never hear from us again. But when you’re actively engaging your community between elections, there will be lots of critical and meaningful work for Young Liberals and other volunteers to do. Some of those tasks provide great opportunities to be mentored by their senior fellow members on career-relevant activities. This is how we will grow people from supporters, to members, to leaders. And this is how young Liberals will make this their party.

Stepping back from the fray for a moment, it’s clear that the current LPC presidency campaign is doing little to help delegates make informed choices. Simply put, we’re unlikely to survive without transformative leadership. The May election results weren’t an anomaly; they continued an 8-year downward plunge that cost us 80% of our seats. That leaves us with a stark choice: we either transform ourselves sufficiently to reverse that plunge or we disappear.

Jim Collins’ well-researched Harvard Business Review paper Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve identifies the leadership traits that differentiate organizations which did and didn’t succeed in making such transitions. Those traits are strikingly differentfrom what most Boards are looking for in a transformative CEO.

As a political party, our dynamics differ from those of a corporation. In effect, we have two CEOs with very different jobs: a Leader to be our public face in Parliament and to speak for us to the electorate; and the National President to represent the interests of our members and to ensure that the Party creates long-term winning conditions in 308 disparate ridings. Success requires the right people in each of those jobs. For the next two years, we have a very effective Leader in Bob Rae. It’s up to delegates to decide who among the candidates will be equally effective in the entirely different role of National President.

Applying Collins’ research to our situation, we clearly need a Level 5 Executive at this critical point in our history. What we will actually get is one of the four current contenders. Honesty requires me to admit up front that none of us is perfect. Our members will be relying on delegates to choose which of us comes closest. Getting to the point of this post, the campaign is being run as a political contest: get-out-the-vote techniques; glad-handing at Liberal gatherings; media interviews; one-minute sound bites at debates which afford little opportunity for real dialogue; content-free imagery on websites; etc. Those may be essential for running for political office, but they say next to nothing about likely performance in the real job that we’re running for. Speaking for myself, I’m really uncomfortable with the campaign dynamic of having to constantly blow my own horn. It’s not about me; it’s about getting the job done.

I have put a lot of thought into what that job is really about and what it will take to do it well. I urge every delegate to rise above the buzz of the campaign and decide on what just kind of leadership you’re actually looking for. Then, critically examine all the candidate websites looking for hard evidence of relevant experience leading complex organizations through the kind of transformative changes we need. What was the scope of each candidate’s roles and what were the real-world outcomes of their performance in those roles? Do they back up their ideas with sound arguments? That may sound like a lot of work, but isn’t the future of the Liberal Party worth it? This race needs to be about substance, not image. Having successfully managed large-scale change elsewhere and, within our Party, having led my riding association through its own transition point (one done, 307 to go), I would welcome more of a focus on solid track records.